Description
Saturday, Mar 23, 10:30am-4:30pm
Open to all
Limited to 12 participants
Hybrid Workshop*
‘Fifteenth-century mapmakers developed the concept of the ‘isolarion’: the type of map that describes specific areas in detail, but does not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to one another.’
Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places
‘Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather, our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around us.’
Adrienne Rich
Where do you come from?
Where do you inhabit?
Where do you belong?
Using the concept of the isolarion, and practices and techniques from psycho-geography, participants will create a short suite of poems exploring significant places, relationships, communities, cultures, and experiences in their lives, to explore and trace threads running from the past to present to future. Can we find the through line?
The first half of the workshop will be dedicated to using materials and techniques from psycho-geography to map significant places, experiences, and relationships from our lives, in order to create our own isolarions. This will be a sensory, intuitive exercise, designed to dig deep into the unconscious, using not only language but image, colour, texture, sound, gesture, and instinct.
The second half of the workshop will be dedicated to a more reflective analysis of the isolarions and creating a short suite of poems bridging one experience and another.
Participants will be asked to bring a few personal materials (fabric, postcards, photos, etc.).
*This workshop will take place at the QWF Office (Room 3, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Westmount, Quebec) with up to 2 virtual spots for participants who are unable to attend in-person. By default, all workshop registrations are for in-person spots. If you would like to attend the workshop via Zoom, first email Riley ([email protected]) to see if online spots are still available for this workshop, and then wait for confirmation. Virtual spots are limited and are reserved for people who either live outside Montreal or have a medical condition.
